Abstract: This study predicted the potential distribution of Trichiurus lepturus along China's coastal waters under the influence of global climate change, using the MaxEnt model integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) technoques. Species occurrence data (212 valid points) were obtained from GBIF and FishBase, while environmental variables were sourced from Bio-ORACLE. Model performance was evaluated using the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, with a high accurracy (0.913) of Area Under the Curve (AUC). Our results indicated that suitable habitats for T. lepturus are distributed across China's four major marine regions, with medium to high suitability areas accounting for 11.96% of the total predicted area. Temperature, chlorophyll concentration, and primary productivity were identified as the most influential factors affecting distribution. The projection model under different SSP scenarios suggested an expansion of suitable habitats with a potential northward shift towards the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea, while in the waters of SouthChina eg. Beibu Gulf area its distribution will be contracted in the future.

Key words: Trichiurus lepturus, MaxEnt model, potential habitat, global climate change, marine environmental factors